Review of the Cigar itself: After doing a bit of work this morning, I decided to give another of the Los Blancos a go. The construction wasn’t as smooth as the others and again a couple of veins poked through the dairy chocolate coloured wrapper. The tobacco smelled deeply earthy with a bit of tobacco sweet on the side. It took a bit more to light this one but once lit it was an interesting flavour to start off with. It made me think of incense, which to me — as a buddhist — doesn’t taste that bad. This isn’t a flavoured cigar like a Drew Estate or anything. It was just the mixture of tobaccos and my taste buds that seemed to start things off this way.

All that remains..

The burn tugboated a bit as things got started in the first third of the cigar. The incense taste didn’t go away and the aroma was a strong, wet earthy smell. The ash was a mash of greys and wasn’t too solid as it fell off unexpectedly at one point. The aroma stayed the same and the amount of smoke it produced was plentiful. The taste, however, began to change to a more light leather taste mixed with the incense as I started to move into the middle third of the cigar. The incense flavour dissipated almost completely and a more mellow smokey cedar flavour started to come through.

By the last third, this was the flavour that remained with minor hints of leather in the background. While the start was a little off-putting the ending was far more tastier and if the cigar had that all the way through, it would have tasted far better. Not a bad cigar but not one that I would regularly get. At this point, the Connecticut Shade is still top of the pile for Los Blancos.